South Korean President Lee Jae Myung has called on North Korea to permit brief reunions of families that have been separated by the Korean War decades ago, although analysts say his pleas will almost certainly fall on deaf ears in Pyongyang.

"Unfortunately, inter-Korean relations are currently mired in deep distrust, but the issue of separated families remains the top priority that South and North Korea must work together to resolve," Lee said this Saturday, in a speech marking the third annual memorial day for separated families.

Lee urged "dialogue and cooperation" to resolve the issue.

The large-scale fighting between the two Koreas and their allies ended with the 1953 armistice which divided the peninsula. With no permanent peace treaty in place, however, North and South Korea are technically still at war.

In this speech, Lee pledged that his administration would do its "utmost to ensure peace takes root on the Korean Peninsula" and make sure that "the grief of the separated families is not passed down to future generations."

North Korea 'has all the cards'

Lee's comments came shortly before the celebration of Chuseok, the annual harvest festival when families gather and pay respects to their ancestors.

North Korea has yet to respond to Lee's remarks regarding family reunions. Such meetings have been organized in the past — the last one in 2018 when 83 North Koreans were able to meet 89 relatives from the South after many decades. The oldest South Korean who was selected by lottery to travel to the North for the reunion was 101 years old.

There is now a growing recognition that time is running out for the dwindling number of divided families on each side of the Demilitarized Zone. Pyongyang's stance on the issue seems to have only grown more hostile, with North Korea demolishing the traditional meeting place for families earlier this year.

"I do not think the North has any intention of even replying," said Kim Sang-woo, a former politician with the left-leaning South Korean Congress for New Politics who now serves on the board of the Kim Dae-jung Peace Foundation.

"Right now, North Korea has all the cards and can agree to reunions, but since it developed its alliances with China and Russia it has no need to do anything that the South wants," he told DW.

While North Korea is still largely politically isolated and dependent on China, it has now also forged a strong partnership with Russia which saw North Korean troops being shipped out to Russia to fight in the Ukraine war.

"Obviously (South Korean President) Lee has good intentions, but this will be torture for families who are going to be given false hope that they might get to see their relatives in the North, only to be disappointed," Kim said.

A lifetime without news of family

Dan Pinkston, a professor of international relations at the Seoul campus of Troy University, has met a number of Koreans who have been separated from relatives since the 1950s war and do not even know if their loved ones are still alive.

"It is a completely tragic situation," he said. "I know a man who works at the Unification Ministry in Seoul and who has worked on efforts to arrange reunions in the past. His father had a sister who was training to be a nurse when the North Koreans invaded in 1950 and was seized when Seoul fell."

"She was taken to the North but there was no word of her after that," he said. "Decades later, whenever the North provided the ministry with lists of names of people who wanted to take part in reunions, he would always go through the names to see if he could find his aunt."

"He never did and that is heartbreaking — but that is only one of thousands of people who have been affected," he said.

Pinkston agrees that there is little likelihood of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un heeding Lee's request.

"Why would Kim do a political favor to the South?" Pinkston asked, pointing out that Seoul no longer had leverage that it used to have with offers of economic and other assistance.

North's propaganda 'spell' threatened by reunited families

Another factor the North may be taking into account is that if the reunions did go ahead, it could lead to a surge in fraternal feelings for the South.

"There is the very real risk of reunions provoking nationalist sentiment and the emotional desire for reunification, which goes against the policy that Pyongyang has adopted in the last year that says the North and South are 'two hostile states,'" Pinkston said.

Kim Sang-woo also points out a propaganda pitfall for the North should the reunions go ahead.

"The regime tightly controls its people under a sort of spell that they have created," he said. "For generations they have told their people that the South is corrupt, that we are slaves of the United States, that we are not independent, that there is widespread disorder and that the South is on the brink of collapse," he added.

"To keep that image alive, they cannot allow any contact between their people and relatives in the South," Kim underlined. "It is terribly sad, of course, but I do not see the North changing its position on this any time soon."

Edited by: Darko Janjevic